The AI Foundation builds a proprietary human-AI collaboration platform that lets people create digital personas that mirror themselves and trains ethical AI agents to complete tasks. It operates as a dual commercial and nonprofit enterprise and runs projects such as Reality Defender, a tool that scans images and videos for deepfakes and supports reporting. The company partners with research groups, including the Technical University of Munich’s Visual Computing Lab, and has published papers and a public dataset on media forgery detection. Consumer-facing examples built on its platform include Digital Deepak, an AI assistant for wellness and mindfulness. The recent $17 million round will be used to scale the company’s platform and advance its Guardian AI protections and virtual-being ambitions. Founded in 2017 and based in San Francisco, the company has now raised around $28 million in total funding. AI Foundation develops personalized AI and products aimed at democratizing and decentralizing artificial intelligence. Its first released product, Reality Defender, combines human moderation and machine learning to identify malicious deceptive content such as deepfakes. The company says it will commercialize additional products that "benefit humanity" but declined to disclose specific plans. Created in 2017 and operated in stealth until recently, AI Foundation positions itself as both a commercial and social venture and has formed a Global AI Council to anticipate and counteract negative effects of AI. CEO Lars Buttler leads the company, which is based in San Francisco and currently has 25 employees. The firm emphasizes developing near-term tools using existing AI technology to improve people’s lives and counteract harms.

Total raised

$27M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Jul 2020